It's our homecoming day!

Watching the sunrise this morning was exciting.
Here I sit, in the same spot I have sat for the more than a month, every morning.
I have pleaded with the Lord in this spot.
I have battled hopelessness, anger, frustration, and sadness.
I have wrestled with them, and have run to the Lord and His Word.
Ten days ago, I wrote in my journal as I sat here,
"I'm watching light spill out on another morning, and Ella's not here.
She's not coming this week.
Probably not next week.
Lord, help me to trust you and your timing."
The Lord has ministered to me in those moments.
But today...today I have watched light spill out on the day she comes home.
This very day, she will be in our home! I have thought about this day everyday
for the past 113 days.
It's finally here!
In fact, as I type, Rusty and Ella are on a flight from Washington D.C. to Houston.
She is actually a U.S. citizen now. (I think. I won't pretend to understand all the legalities from here.)
She handled the overnight flight beautifully. Two more flights to go.
Today will just be the beginning of our new life together.
There is so much to adjust to! Our electronic lives take these children by surprise!
It's like us going to live with the Jetson's all of a sudden!
Things move by themselves! Escalators, garage doors, like magic.
The face of College Station, TX could not look more different from her home in Ghana.
Food. Oh goodness. Food is so hard! This will be a challenge.
And I know that some things I anticipate to be hard, might go swimmingly well!
And there will be things that catch us completely off guard!
Signing all of the time, all of us, is going to be challenge #1, if you ask me!
But all of these challenges, we are ready... I think we're ready (deep sigh and prayer)...
to face them today. We face them with great joy in having all of our family together,
under one roof for the first time today! Praise the Lord, for putting all of these children
as a gift under our care. What an awesome, take your breath away, strike the fear of God in you,
responsibility and privelege.
By the grace of God, we forge a new path today in the Bacak home.
The Bacak Nation has gone national! Praise the Lord! Today is the day!

Coming Home!

Finally, our daughter is coming home.
Rusty is leaving this week to go get her and we even have a plane ticket for her to the U.S.!
We are so relieved that this waiting period is coming to an end, and that we feel certain her visa will be issued.
We appreciate more than we can say the prayers so many have prayed on her behalf.
We can't wait for her to get here! Friends and family, this little girl is a spitfire, so it's time for you to meet her!
We know getting her home is just the beginning of a sweet, rewarding, but extremely difficult journey.
But we are so thrilled to add Ella to our family, as God ordained it to be from the beginning of time!
These first few weeks are going to be overwhelming for her, and probably for us as well.
Can you imagine the culture shock these children feel?
Having spent two weeks in Ghana, seeing how night and day different it is there, I know it's going to be serious overload for her.
Every adoption expert tells you to stay home and establish a routine as much as possible in the first few weeks.
Introduce people in your life slowly, not all at once.
Keep the traffic in and out of your house at a minimum initially.
Some of the hurdles we'll face involve food, air conditioning, and of course, BONDING!
Adding an older child to your family is big enough, but adding a deaf child has its own unique challenges.
Communication as a family will be a learning process, to say the least.
If you feel led to pray for us, you can pray:
-For all of my children to learn to sign fluently and that we would all be committed to using sign at all times in the house. This is huge! (Some of my kids are signing better than others.)
-Pray for Ella's adjustment to U.S. culture, food, environment, being surrounded by SO MANY white people, and sleep.
-Pray for bonding for everyone! As Ella grieves the loss of her birth family, she has to embrace us as her family, and vice versa. Please pray for this process, that God would do what only He can do in our family!
-For Ella's schooling. There is so much to consider, and we need divine wisdom as we begin teaching her and continue to make decisions concerning her education.
-We need people in our life that can sign/ will learn to sign to be babysitters, interpreters at church, etc. We are so thankful for the people He has already provided! Praise the Lord!
-Finally, safe travel for Rusty and Ella, and for their bonding while they are there together.

I'm sure there's more, but I'll stop.
Thank you again to those who have followed this, who have prayed, and who continue to pray. We can't tell you how thankful we are!

Waiting Well

Let me update you on the progress of Ella’s visa…(deep sigh)...well…there is no real update to give. She has an appointment at the Embassy tomorrow, August 29th, and we hope to know something after that appointment. However, we have learned that this Embassy is completely uncommunicative and only gives us conflicting and confusing bits of information via e-mail. So answers and timelines are extremely hard to come by.
We have been in a period of waiting. Who likes waiting? Not me! This is not the way I wanted this thing to go down. But God is truly sanctifying us during this time of waiting for Ella to come home. I pray we look more like Christ because of it.
A friend and elder at our church wrote an article several months back about waiting well. They were waiting for their baby to come home, in the painful waiting period of their adoption process. I was so glad my friend Lindsay sent me that article to read this week. Her husband Kyle wrote, quite articulately, about what it meant to wait well.
This was a good jumping off place for me this week in my time with the Lord and journaling. I decided to share my own thoughts of what God has shown me concerning waiting well, and how I’ve failed to do so at times.
Here are my five points, inspired by my friends, in what it means for us to wait well right now:

1. Waiting with truth. We need to be meditating on scripture, on God’s goodness, His nearness, and His love for us during this time. I also have put on scripture that reminds me that God can be trusted, and that our hope is in Him, not in man. The passage I’ve clung to the most is from Psalm 33.
“We wait in hope for the Lord;
He is our help and our shield.
In Him our hearts rejoice,
For we trust in His holy name.
May your unfailing love rest upon us,
O Lord, even as we put our hope in You!”

2. As I wait, I need to be making the most of the waiting days I'm given. This means being productive, present with my husband and children and the people around me, not just living for the future. I need to take advantage of the days of preparation this allows me. I found this very difficult at first. Moving on with our life as normal without our daughter felt wrong and painful. Our life is not normal. We did not just go on vacation to Ghana and come back the same. God did the amazing thing He does with adoption, where He takes our hearts and knits them together with a child that does not look like us, does not share our DNA, does not share much at all in common, come to think of it! But in two weeks time (and this is a bonding process that can vary in time for every family, every adoption, but the end result is the same), we gained a daughter that we love like we love our other children. Something drastic happened to our family. And it was invisible to everyone who saw us because we did not bring her home with us. God had to force me to get up and move and be present in my life during this waiting period and grief I felt in leaving her behind. I think this is true for many people who are grieving, period. We have had a summer filled with grief. Just to recap this summer, we lost Rusty's Mom, and 10 days later, lost my grandfather. A few days after the funeral, we left for Ghana and started the emotional roller coaster of our adoption. It's been intense! And everywhere we turn, we feel grief. But people who have grieved much more tragic losses than ours can tell you, we have to move on. I need to take each day of this waiting period as the gift it is, and live the precious life He's given me.

3. Waiting in prayer. I'm going to be honest. Sometimes it's easier to seek distraction rather than focus on prayer. Don't get me wrong, I think distraction has it's place in seasons like this, but my focus need to remain. Prayer. It's all we have. Pleading to the God of the universe that holds all things in His hands. He is good and hears our prayers.

4. Waiting in community. Even when clinging to the truths about God and being in prayer, pain exists. Real pain. It's tempting when you are feeling pain to want to crawl inside a shell and hide from people and community. I have had to force myself at times to be with people and to be real with people. I have found myself gravitating toward the people I feel freedom to be the most real with. Being in community in these times can be challenging, but the alternative is withdrawal from community, and isolation. I believe isolation is exactly where the Enemy wants every one of us. That is where he does his best work. The truth is, I need people in my life I can hurt with, be honest with, cry with, and live this life with. This is the Body of Christ. This is what I need desperately.

5. Waiting with perspective. Grief, pain, loss, and waiting can be consuming. It tends to be the first thing you think about when you wake up in the morning, and the last thing when you go to sleep. It can fill your thoughts every minute in between if you let it and your dreams at night. But I need my thoughts to be outward, remembering others who are hurting, some in far more severe situations, and some in far less. I need to force myself to draw my thoughts and attention to others and always to Christ. Thinking about myself and my emotions 24/7 is not the answer. Isn't honesty lovely?

I know these are just my thoughts as we wait, but maybe someone else is in a waiting season. I mean, who isn't waiting for something? And maybe some of you are grieving something as well. This has been a strange time in our life. We have so much to learn about waiting well, and honoring God in all we think and do! But that is truly our desire.

I hope to give a good news update very soon on Ella's visa. Will you continue to pray with us?

Waiting on a visa

So, I know I've neglected to update here, as I promised I would.
Do you ever feel too sad to go public with all your emotions and tell cyberspace exactly how you're feeling?
That's been a lot of this summer, and I chose this time to revive my blog. Ironic.
But I know it's time to update so many who are praying for our Ella to come home, and ask you to pray specifically.
Obviously, we left our Ella in Ghana.
That was one of the hardest things we've ever done, to sum it up simply.
We tried to explain governmental bureaucracy to an eight-year-old for two days, explained where she would be going after we left...in ASL/ Ghanaian signs...but our explanations fell flat.
She didn't understand, and we don't understand it really either.
Our experiences with the U.S. Embassy have not been all pleasant. That was disappointing.
Everything I knew about U.S. Embassies was on the movies. Like everything else in movies, it's not quite the same.
We brought our little girl to the airport. She and I both had started crying about two hours before the airport.
I held her and cried with her right up to the very last minute.
I would sign things to her like "You know we love you, right?" She would shrug.
I would sign, "when you come to America, we will celebrate! We will have a party! I don't know when it will be, but we will be waiting for you!"
She would shrug.
She didn't know those things. She doesn't have a context for parental faithfulness. She doesn't really know if we're people of our word.
Right now, she waits at her school, in the care of her headmaster, but I don't know how she's feeling. I don't know if she expects us to come for her at all? Has she written us off yet?
I pray she hasn't.
I am praying that God would whisper in her ear, "They're coming back for you. They're coming. Just wait."
We are waiting too.
It felt completely wrong to come home and move on with life as usual.
It was wonderful to wrap our arms around our four little ones here at home! Wow! We missed those kids!
However, jet lagged parents should not be allowed to parent unsupervised upon arrival.
We were completely unfit parents! Rusty came down with a fever in the first hour we were home.
We both had felt sick, but I thought it was just that youth group lock-in feeling from "sleeping" on an airplane, traveling for 24 hours, and eating the airplane snacks and what was left in my disghusting backpack.
But when I saw Rusty with fever and ASLEEP when we arrived, I knew we were in trouble.
I thought for sure he'd brought the souvenir of MALARIA home with us.
He ached, had a headache, chills and fever. You know what that's called in Africa? Malaria.
But thank the Lord, his fever came down, and he assured me it was some other virus. Still a virus picked up in Africa. Not very comforting.
Rusty has since recovered, thank you dear Lord.
We have spent time with our attention starved children.
The giant pile of LIFE waiting for me has been waded through and sorted into piles, some of it accomplished.
Life is moving on in this house with our four children.
BUT WE HAVE FIVE. We have five children. One is missing. We left her on another continent across the ocean.
We are awaiting her visa, and then Rusty will be on a plane to go get her!
We don't have a way to communicate with her, so pray with us that she knows we are coming for her.
But we don't know when.
Let me try to break this down as best I know how.
There are two main parts to getting our little girl a visa.
The first falls under the Department of Homeland Security. They can take up to 60 business days to review her file. Yes friends, that is about three months.
They can interview all of her birth family, and anyone else they want. It would be about a 10 hour trip, a long bus ride, to get them from their village to Accra and the Embassy. But it happens all the time.
We have a great praise to report, in that we received our approval from the DHS on Friday!!! I sat shocked with my coffee and hardly awake at my computer Friday morning! There it was. I read it, reread it, and then called Rusty! Wow! It only took 8 business days! Praise the Lord!!!
Next, we have the Consular Dept. They should contact us soon and tell us what we need to do and when we can come for her exit visa interview.
We have heard of people getting appts. within two weeks, or two months. There's no way for us to know when.
We hope to hear from them soon!
Please pray with us for an appt. very soon, and for Rusty to be able to go and get our little girl and bring her home!!!
Friends and Family, you have no idea what is about to hit you! This girl is one BIG personality! I'm ready to introduce our world to Emmanuella Bacak.
I'm ready for her to come home!

Leaving for Ghana

We leave for Ghana today.
I will not write long, because I am soaking up every minute I have with my kiddos.
I can't seem to swallow the reality that today is July 24....July 24th. We've been telling people for weeks that we would travel on July 24th. I guess that seemed far away. But it's not. It's now.
I have bags packed. Full of my stuff (what do you wear in Africa? I clearly don't know!) Full of Ella's new stuff. Full of coffee creamer, because I'm a coffee addict that really doesn't like coffee without good creamer. I'll fall apart.
With a bucket of goldfish and Craisins,and food that will sustain us when we can't fill up on fish with eye balls looking at us.
My stomach is nervous. It has been since yesterday. What in the world is this going to be like?
We will meet our daughter for the first time in a little more than 24 hours. What will we say?
I am leaving my kids behind for longer than I ever thought I would. (I'm a homeschool Mom, okay? 2 weeks is like forever.)
How will they feel while we are gone? (Peace of mind for me: they are in AWESOME hands!)
There is so much opportunity to TRUST THE LORD. Trust them with my current children, and my child I've not met yet.
Trust him with every anxiety, every nagging fear, every creeping thought that if I let it grow will become a cancer in my mind of full blown WORRY.
I will pray. pray. pray. PRAY!
God has been amazingly faithful to get us this far. His hand has been on every single detail. If this thing were up to me, I would have totally screwed it up by now. This deal started more than two years ago, and when I thought it was all falling apart, questioned if this adoption would ever happen, God was at work. He was orchestrating every event to lead us to this. Looking back, it's been like clock work. Invisible clock work.
So I will trust Him. And I will beg every person I know to pray for us. So here is how you can pray:

1. For my kids while we are gone. That the weeks would go fast, but that they would lean on the Lord, and be safe and happy. We've obviously never left them for two weeks. Pray for my anxiety about leaving them and for theirs.

2. For safe travel. I am a little nervous about missing our connection to our flight to Ghana. If we do, we miss our court date! I am also nervous about the long flight over the ocean, so I'm praying we can sleep on the plane. That travel time would be calming and God would ready our hearts to meet Ella.

3. For our meeting and bonding with Ella. I have no idea how our little girl is feeling, and we can't expect her to be excited about us, but we are praying for immediate bonding, and for love and trust to grow daily! Also pray for our communication to be clear.

4. For her visa. This will require a miracle. But basically, if she could get her visa in three days time, she could come home with us. They have the right to review it for 60 days. We are the first family from our agency to adopt through the Ghana program, so we really don't know how long it will take, But we REALLY want to bring her home the first time. We have been told this is basically impossible. But we are asking anyway. Will you please pray for a miracle with us?

5. We have the opportunity to visit with her birth family while we are there. Pray that we would be a blessing to them, we could share the Gospel when given the chance, and would bring them peace of mind about Ella's future well-being. (Note: we won't be sharing publicly her "story" behind her birth family and reasons for this adoption. We want to protect them and Ella's privacy.)

6. Paperwork. Ugh. Please pray for every detail to fall into place with paperwork. Our adoption hangs on this.

Thank you for praying, and we will try to update our blog to keep everyone posted.

Getting ready!

We have been a little MIA online, with no recent blog posts or FB action.
Do you ever have so much going on in your life and heart that you don't have words for it? A blurb or a post just seems wrong.
That's where we've been.
Rusty's Mom had a stroke about 10 days ago, and we returned from our Camp Ozark trip just two days into it to be by her side. Rusty was able to spend most of his time by her bedside. What a gift this was! She wanted to hang on so she could meet Ella. But she just couldn't. We spent her final days with her, and Bernadette Bacak passed away last Sunday. Losing a parent...well I have no words to do it justice...but it stinks. She was only 67. She had complicated health issues, and her body just gave out. But we are thankful for our time with her, and are missing her so much. My children are grieving with us, and Rusty's whole family, especially her devoted husband, Ray, is missing her terribly.
She was a great Grammy! She loved her grandkids, and I'm sad Ella will miss knowing her in person. But we will certainly tell her all about her Grammy, and my kids will surely fill her in. She was the Grammy with candy in her pantry and in her purse every time they saw her, that LOVED giving the kids presents and watching them play with them, and loved just sitting and talking with them.
We are sad for us. Terribly sad. But we can't help but rejoice for her, that she is with her Savior, with a brand new, perfect body. We can't wait to be with her again, because our hope is in heaven, and in Christ alone! When it comes down to the end of this life, it's amazingly clear that ALL WE HAVE IS JESUS! Nothing else matters! What we've done with Jesus and the Gospel message extended to us is IT.


As we have come home, and tried to catch up on life, we realize...
We leave for in Ghana in just over two weeks! What!? Time is flying, and there is much to do.
Check out her bunk bed that Rusty built! The top bunk is the bed Rusty built for Emma when she was ready for a big girl bed, about 8 years ago. He built a duplicate and stacked them on top of each other. Our girls will be sharing a room.

My favorite thing in Emma's room is this name board that my sweet friend Heather made for Emma's birthday one year. We decided Ella had to have one too. So with some help from Rusty and my friend Mallory, we have one for Ella.

Last night, we did some shopping to get some things ready for her. I am taking clothes for her to wear, and little things for her to do. Here are some of her cutest new outfits. (I'm totally guessing what size she is! I hope I'm right!)

Here is a book of paper dolls I bought last night. I got some coloring books and books to read as well. We have lots of hotel time, plus a loooong flight home before she sets foot in Texas.

Shopping for her is the fun part. Doing all the online classes and reading all the books about everything that could go wrong and all the hard stuff is not exactly fun. I know it's necessary, but not fun.
Having a bed ready, with sweet pink rosebud sheets is FUN.
A girl!!! We are a little heavy on boys around here. Every time I clean a bathroom around here, I have begged God to give us another girl. Thank you, Lord!

We also have made some wonderful new friends who have the greatest kids, Jian and Tanner, who are deaf and adopted. How awesome is that! Thank you, God! My friend Shelly gave us some signing DVDs that we can take along for her to watch, as well as some travel tips. Thanks Shelly!

What you can pray for:
* Pray for us as we grieve the loss of Rusty's Mom, and prepare to add to our family at the same time.
* Pray for Ella's visa to come in while we are still in Ghana so we can bring her home! The odds of this are slim, but we are praying for a miracle, so that we don't have to leave her there and make a second trip back to Ghana.

I am pregnant with a four to eight-year-old

Adding to your family through adoption has some commonalities with birthing children. The waiting period before your baby/ child arrives is still a waiting period. I don't go to the bathroom as much, and nobody asks me about her date of arrival while I'm in line at Target, but she's coming nonetheless.

When I was waiting for Justus, I very much felt prego. Well...in some ways. When I was pregnant, I threw up. A LOT. I was super sick and my body rejected pregnancy on every level. This is not why we chose adoption after we had Emma and Jax, but it sure confirmed for us that God had been leading us in the right direction. Our world came to a stop when I was pregnant with Emma and Jax, and I lay in bed or by the toilet, depressed, miserable with what felt like a stomach virus that would just NOT go away. (Young ladies, who have yet to birth babies, don't let this freak you out! This is not the norm! You'll be fine.) Was it worth it? ABSOLUTELY. Every second! But God had begun a work in our hearts before we ever said "I do" that we would add to our family through adoption.
So with three-year-old Emma and two-year-old Jax in tow, we brought home baby Justus. During that waiting period, I pulled out the baby clothes, washed and folded them, and put them in his drawers. We had the infant car seat ready. We did all of those things that waiting parents do. I threw up less, but I was keenly aware that Justus' birthmother, who had chosen us for her baby boy, was carrying him all the while. When we brought him home, we brought home our son, and we could not have felt prouder of him! The waiting was over. This was the part I knew how to do. The baby stuff.

Treston had a different story, and we didn't get him until he was four months old. There was a very short waiting period with him. We got a call about our Treston, and two weeks later- PRESTO! We had our beautiful baby boy with us. He was foster-to-adopt, but somehow my brain shut out the word "foster" almost immediately, and I felt like the emotional, brand new Mom bringing him to church for the first time. He was ours. I cried and held him and marveled at how much I loved him already.

Now we wait for Ella. This waiting period is very different than any other. We've been in this paperwork adoption phase for so long, I think people have quit asking me about it. Somebody recently told me they knew we were in process, but they never thought we would actually bring home a child. Me too, kind of! The day we got the call about our match with Ella, I was shocked! It was one of those phone conversations that went in slow motion almost for me. We were actually swimming at our neighborhood pool. I'm watching my kids splash and my husband throw them in the air, and it feels like a normal day. But it wasn't. It was the day she became real to us. I remember the slow-mo moment waiting to hear her name, waiting to hear that she was deaf, waiting for every detail our social worker had to offer. I felt a little pregnant. I had this amazing secret! No one in line at Target next to me knew. But I knew. I had a daughter named Ella. It was the first thing I thought about before I opened my eyes in the morning, and the last thing I thought about at night. I have a daughter named Ella.

As we wait this time, we are not pulling out car seats and baby swings. We've never adopted an older child, and it's a new world. In our preparation, we are sending documents, searching flights, making hotel arrangements, dealing with visas and passports, and gathering every sweet morsel of information we have about her and trying to guess her age. But my questions definitely outnumber my answers. We have just five short weeks to prepare her room (she is sharing with Emma), Rusty will build her a bed, buy her some clothes (hoping we get something that actually fits her), and most of all, SIGN, SIGN, SIGN. Our world is about to change. In the waiting, there is joy, anxiety, questions, anticipation, preparation, and a lot of prayer.

I'm so thankful for my Savior who is here with us, in the waiting.